Category:Speleothem Working Group

Overview

In the Linked Earth context, a working group (WG) is a self-organized coalition of knowledgeable experts, whose activities are governed herewith. This page is dedicated to the discussion of data and metadata standards for speleothems, and aims to formulate a set of recommendations for such a standard.

Membership

Specific tasks

We recommend that discussions focus on the following techniques, and explore potential commonalities.

For each observation type, we recommend:

• structuring discussions around what scientific questions one would want to ask of the data
• listing essential, recommended, and optional information for:
  • the measurements themselves
  • any inference made from the measurements (e.g. calibration to temperature)
  • the underlying uncertainties, and what those numbers correspond to (e.g. 1-sigma or 2-sigma?)
• provide an ideal data table (or link to one) for each type of observation, so the community knows what to report and how to report it.
• provide separate recommendations for new and legacy datasets

Things to describe

Observations

• stable isotopes
• trace metals
• organics
• fluid inclusions
• mineralogy
• clumped isotopes
• noble gas temperatures
• C14
• Optical Density of luminosity (ODL)
• Mg/Ca

Hydrology

The interpretation of geochemical or lithological signals embedded in speleothem archives relies sometimes heavily on implicit assumptions about cave hydrology. What parameters need to be archived to enable long-term re-use and better information extraction from speleothem datasets? A few come to mind:

• karst residence time
• transit time distributions
• porosity
• soil thickness

Chronology

Please see the chronologies WG for generalities about U/Th dating or layer-counting. If challenges specific to dating speleothems exist, please list relevant metadata properties below.

References